The present invention relates to an automatic telephone answering device for setting a special standby mode.
Some conventional automatic telephone answering devices are automatically set in a standby mode to allow automatic operation even when a user forgets to set the device in the automatic standby mode. If the user interrupts the play back operation during listening to incoming message tape and leaves the automatic telephone answering device as it is, the device is automatically set immediately in the above-mentioned standby mode. However upon reception of an incoming call at that time, the device makes to the play back mode and the recording mode sequentially, wherein an incoming message from a calling party can be recorded. Therefore, when the user returns to restart the incoming message tape to listen to remaining messages, the remaining message may have been erased already.